Google: We Changed Request Indexing Limits & Quotas Over Spam & Abuse

When Google first changed the request indexing limits and quotas in the Google Search Console tool, Google was pretty cryptic and secretive about the whole situation. Just the other day, they documented the new quotas. And during the webmaster hangout, John Mueller was super transparent about why they had to make the change.

He said there were people using it to abuse Google and searchers. People were submitting hacked content, spam and other forms of content that Google did not want in their index. So Google had to change how the quota system worked in order to balance good use of the tool and bad use of the tool.

John Mueller said "sometimes we get a lot of abuse to some of these features and the team has to figure out ways to kind of deal with that abuse in an elegant way. And that it doesn't affect most normal users but it's still able to kind of catch these issues that we run into."

He confirmed the change was related to preventing abuse and spam from getting into the index.

[Barry] And the change with the, I guess, request indexing. I find it very interesting. Can you tell us the reason for that quota change? So now it's like a daily quota for most versus a monthly quota. Is there any like reason, was it being spammed or something? You want to talk about that?

[John] It sounds like it was too useful in some sense. So that's it's something where sometimes we get a lot of abuse to some of these features and the team has to figure out ways to kind of deal with that abuse in an elegant way. And that it doesn't affect most normal users but it's still able to kind of catch these issues that we run into.

So I believe, especially the the submit URL feature, is something that obviously you can use submit spam as well and some people have used that for example to submit hacked content on a website. Which is all not really what what the tool is meant to be used for. So finding a way to deal with that elegantly sometimes takes a bit of experimentation and trying things out.

[Barry] Yeah, okay so your pretty much saying it was changed because of abuse.

[John] Well, I I don't know why why else we would change it like that? I mean it's like these subtle changes.

[Barry] I know we you guys wouldn't say anything about it, why we you kind of quiet about it? I'm like obviously it's about abuse but you just say that.

[John] Okay, thank you figure it out! Yeah no it's sometimes we run across weird things where we think well this makes a lot of sense for normal webmasters and then suddenly it gets used in ways that from our point of view is not the way that it was not to be used.